Professor Eddy

Cottonbro Enjoy the Billboard Disco Action Top 15, dated on June 26th 1976! I believe the best disco was made in 1976, just before the big “Saturday Night Fever bang", when it all became too commercial. In 1976 the line between up-tempo soul and disco was very thin. Disco meant soul music for the dance floor, nothing more and nothing less. It all ended when the movie Saturday Night Fever became a massive success and everyone tried to get a piece of the disco pie. The Philly track by Eli’s Second Coming (MFSB guitarist Bobby Eli) was surprisingly released by T.K. Records, which was based in Hialeah, Florida. The name "TK" was inspired by the initials of sound engineer Terry Kane. He built a recording studio on the second floor of founder Henry Stone’s office. T.K. Records is closely associated with the early rise of disco. In 1974 the label released Rock Your Baby by George McCrae, the second bona fide disco song (after The Hues Corporation's Rock The Boat ) that r...

Enjoy the Record World Disco File Top 20, dated on the 26th of June 1976! Giorgio Moroder’s electronic beats started to come through with two of his productions on the chart : T ry Me I Know We Can Make It by Donna Summer at number 19 and Trouble Maker by German singer Roberta Kelly at number 2. A year later Giorgio Moroder would become immortal when he produced and played synthesizer on Donna Summer’s I Feel Love , the official start of Electronic Dance Music. The Trammps were definitely a band that helped popularizing disco in the mid-seventies. A cover of Zing Went The Strings Of My Heart from The Coasters (originally written for the Broadway musical Thumbs Up ) was their first chart single, reaching number 64 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1972. Despite their ground breaking work for what would become the typical disco sound, the Trammps did not have a string of hits on the American pop charts, even during disco's heyday. They share this injustice with many other representativ...

Unsplash We start summer properly with a new part of Sunny Breeze From The West Coast ! The tracks by State Cows, Page 99 and Citrus Sun are brand new. Enjoy! 😊 Emotion by Samantha Sang is from the upcoming compilation album Katie Puckrik Presents A Yacht Rock Odyssey . She was the host of the critically acclaimed BBC series I Can Go For That about the history of yacht rock. “Yacht Rock is the affectionate nickname for the lush West Coast sound of the 1970s and 80s. Broadly speaking, it’s soft rock jazzed up with soulful flourishes, twinned with aspirational lyrics yearning for a better life. A categorisation of grouping songs with a shared DNA, years after they were originally recorded!” (Katie Puckrik) Tracklist: State Cows – Summer Cloud (2024) Sue Barker – Love To The People (1975) Leon Ware – Deeper Than Love (1982) Jolis & Simone – Night Flight (1979) Carole Bayer Sager – Stronger Than Before (1981) Samantha Sang – Emotion (1977) Page 99 – In My Imagination (2024) ...

Unsplash My latest cloudcast is inspired by the music in the John Hughes movies of the 1980s: a mixture of pop, indie and new wave. He made the perfect soundtracks to stories about big and small troubles in the lives of teenagers. Well-known films from this director were The Breakfast Club , Weird Science , Pretty In Pink and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off . One of the tracks I selected, If You Leave by OMD, sounded during the famous prom scene in Pretty In Pink . Steve Harley, who passed away earlier this year, had quite a few hits in the 1970s, but when the decade came to a close his sales dropped dramatically. In 1982, when he tried to pick up his career, he teamed up with Midge Ure, the front man of Ultravox who were very popular at the time. He produced Steve Harley’s single I Can’t Even Touch You and played an amazing guitar part on it (a bit similar to the one on Dancing With Tears In My Eyes , a later hit single by Ultravox). Unfortunately I Can’t Even Touch You was not successf...

Unsplash The opening song by multi-instrumentalist Matt Dibble is from the posthumously released album Forever . He was one of the founding members of British band Super db, but died unexpectedly in 2021, probably due to an allergic reaction. The track by Percy Mays is from the new compilation LP W3NG , out on Numero, “a sweet selection of mellow grooves” , according to record store Dusty Groove. In 1978, when glam rock band Mud began to fall apart, the main songwriters of the band Rob Davis and Ray Stiles took some time off to record a few singles as a duo and named themselves Roly. One of these singles was Don’t Ever Change , which was a cover of a Carole King & Gerry Coffin composition, first recorded by The Crickets in 1961 (after been rejected by The Everly Brothers). Mud officially split in 1980, but they shortly reunited in the original line-up a few years later. They then recorded  Don’t Ever Change again, this time with their front man Les Gray as the lead singer. On...